The Hugo nominations list at
http:/www.geocities.com/Athens/4824/hugo99.htm now has links to as
many of the nominated works or people's pages as I can find.
(Currently, there are links for six of the eighteen short fiction
pieces.) [-ecl]

I have been giving some thought to why we are bombing Kosovo.
The question I am asking myself is why are Americans getting
involved so much more than, say, the French or the Japanese. My
conclusion is well, yes, it would be a strong moral wrong not to
get involved but also I think that in part we are paying for sins
that are some sixty years old. And the reason we are paying for
them is all tied up with the state of technology and in particular
the invention in this century of the motion picture camera. That
sounds like a lot of peculiar things to put into the one bag, but
they all connect up.

There have been lots of ethnic-related atrocities through history.
Ethnic cleansings have been attempted many times in history. There
have been pogroms and massacres and ethnic cleansings. (As an
aside I heard recently that only one relatively modern ethnic
cleansing has ever been totally successful and it is not one of the
once that comes first to mind. There are no living descendents of
the native New Zealanders.) But by and large these atrocities have
always been a good distance away in what was at the time a very
large world. People generally did nothing to stop ethnic
cleansing. It had always been possible to look the other way and
to be isolationist. It was difficult to get information, even if
one wanted it. Really it was the movie camera that changed that.

But prior to the movie camera, look what Americans did to other
Americans in places like Andersonville, Georgia, during the Civil
War. That was a case of Americans systematically starving other
Americans--Northern prisoners of war. If you dig into the details,
it was pretty gruesome, but overall it is considered a minor
incident because of what was basically low bandwidth bringing the
news. There might have been a few photographs, but mostly the news
was carried by the written word. And the written word is limited
in its impact. So Andersonville became a sad incident in a
regrettable war. If it could have been covered by newsreels or
video-reporters it would instead have been a major atrocity.

People in the 1930s and 1940s had grown up in a world where low
bandwidth reporting had made it fairly easy to be isolationist
about atrocities. And people found it profitable to be
isolationist. The Holocaust freed up a lot of money and goods into
the economy. It was not just Germans confiscating property or
Jewish gold in Swiss banks. It was money and property and art and
jewelry and who knows what else all over the world. All kinds of
people were profiting from having Jews lose claim to their
property. Meanwhile the military were running bombing raids often
within miles of known concentration camps, but for only the best of
reasons they never made an effort to interrupt the grisly business
that was going on in the camps. In most countries the acceptance
of refugees was kept to a feeble trickle. People died to get out
news of what was going on in the camps only to have American
newspapers bury the stories. There were lots of different people
who for selfish reasons did nothing. It was like HIGH NOON on a
worldwide scale.

There were also some people who did a good deal more than nothing,
but few official institutions--governments, churches, etc.--ever
got around to condemning officially the mass murder of that was
going on in Europe.

That was pretty much the way America had treated atrocities in the
past. But this Holocaust was different from most previous ethnic
cleansings in two important ways. It was really a lot more than an
ethnic cleansing. It was a venting of a national fury. And what
made it worse and even more sadistic was that it was done by a
technologically advanced and systematic people. Most ethnic
cleansings are primarily the removal of inconvenient people. Even
the term "cleansing" implies that. When we do cleansing, we bear
little animosity to the dirt of which we are ridding ourselves. We
give little thought to what is removed; we are just trying to
improve the state of the thing being clensed. That was not true of
the Nazi Holocaust. The focus was not in cleaning the population
but specifically in attacking particular people: Jews, gypsies,
homosexuals, etc., but primarily Jews. What was important to the
Nazis was not so much that the Jews died, but that the Jews died
screaming. If a Jew somehow managed to die a peaceful death it was
something of a failure. That policy has little to do with a
cleansing action. And it is one thing that made this holocaust
unique.

Then came the end of the war. And governments wanted to once again
justify to the people that the war they had fought was just. So
they made and showed films of the barbarity of the camps, not
realizing that this also would make the German Holocaust unique.
For the first time they could show the results of atrocity. But at
the same time what people--American people among others--had wanted
to ignore they had their nose rubbed in. They were filmed because
they were victims of the Nazis, but to some extent they also were
victims of allied apathy. Here were pictures of what actually
happened to the people who for various important bureaucratic
reasons could not be allowed to emigrate out of the hell of Europe
except in the barest numbers. The people who had been ignored no
longer could be thought of as just statistics--elements of a
refugee problem; they were the human matchsticks, the things that
now really did not look human, who were showing up in newsreels.
Photography and film brought the pictures to movie theaters and
eventually to television and living rooms. Photography was a major
difference between this holocaust and all previous holocausts. The
Nazi war on the innocent was the last holocaust that the American
people could claim not to have known about and the first that that
public could really see and understand the results. And incidents
where refugees were turned away looked worse and worse.

The United States government had intentionally obstructed the
escape from Europe of refugees and then had to live with the public
seeing the results of that policy. It was not long after and
perhaps not entirely coincidental that the government started
routing out foreign influences in the country, many of which were
associated with Jews. It was as if the government was reacting to
unspoken accusations by saying, "See, these people really were
dangerous." But the stigma of having done so little and of the
public seeing the result has not gone away. We did little to stop
the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda. But sadly the American people seem
to have more empathy for Europeans. And with it being Europeans
with their head on the block in Kosovo the world seems, rightly or
wrongly, to assume that it is the Americans' responsibility to lead
any counter- measures that are taken. Whether that is a reasonable
expectation is a moot point. But with the world looking at us, the
nothing we did to stop the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s is
coming back to memory and it is a nothing that would be shameful to
do again. [-mrl]

Capsule: Erick Zonca's film tells the
bittersweet and moderately predictable story of
two young women living a picaresque life
together in a borrowed apartment. Somewhat in
the style of Truffaut's THE 400 BLOWS they live
amorally, stealing where they can. Their life
is a hand to mouth existence with occasional
relationships with men. The portraits are
well-etched, but the story is very low-key and
overly long. Rating: 5 (0 to 10), low +1 (-4
to +4)
New York Critics: 13 positive, 1 negative, 2
mixed

THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS is basically a simple slice-of-life story
told at a leisurely pace. Twenty-one year old Isa (Elodie Bouchez)
comes to the town of Lille in the north part of France to be near
her boyfriend only to find out he is out of the country working on
a construction job. With no money and no place to live she barely
makes enough to feed herself by cutting pictures from magazines and
turning them into greeting cards and religious decorations which
she sells on the street claiming the proceeds are for charity. She
spends her time freeloading and getting into trouble. For a few
weeks she lives without a home begging from strangers. During a
stint in an abortive attempt at a job in a sewing factory she
befriends Marie (Natacha Regnier) and moves into an apartment that
Marie is looking after for Sandine, a comatose woman that neither
Iso nor Marie has actually met. Marie feels little gratitude to
Sandine, but Isa feels some responsibility to their unwitting
benefactor and spends hours in the hospital reading to the
unconscious Sandine. Isa and Marie meet and make friends with two
working class men, Fredo and Charly, (Jo Prestia and Patrick
Mercado) who do security at concerts and work as club bouncers.
The two remain only occasionally romantic friends. But then Marie
meets and gets involved with Chris (Gregoire Colin), the attractive
young owner of two up-scale bars. Isa does not think much of Chris
and believes that Marie is reaching beyond her station. She is
certain that Marie will only be hurt in the end.

Though not nearly as disturbed as the woman returned from the dead
she plays in J'AIMERAIS PAS CREVER UN DIMANCHE, Bouchez plays Isa
as punk and sassy, yet with a sincere and caring core. Isa
lavishes hours of care and attention on Sandine, but shies away
from receiving any gratitude for the effort. Regnier plays Marie
as a romantic in spite of herself, lacking either in free will or
sense.

Erick Zonca, who co-wrote the screenplay as well as directed, has
given us a detailed and three-dimensional picture of two very
marginalized women. His Isa and Marie just get by, frequently by
stealing, with very little thought for the future. They are not
the most likable characters, but they are probably much like women
that can be found in any city. Zonca does not romanticize and
makes little attempt to excuse, but they are very believable and
very real people. One is reminded both of THE 400 BLOWS in the
earlier parts of the film and of "La Boheme" later. His deliberate
pacing may well end up being more frustrating in the US than in his
native France. And it would be one thing if the pacing were used
to add depth to the characters. Frequently they are involved in
some activity that tells us little about their character beyond
that Isa is not particularly fastidious with her nail polish.

Overall there is really about a half-hour or perhaps an hour's
worth of story here spread thinly over 113 minutes. While the
title is not quite as sarcastic and bitter as ANOTHER DAY IN
PARADISE, this is not a world to which the viewer may want to
contribute so much time. I give the film 5 on the 0 to 10 scale
and a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]